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Monday, June 26, 2017

Last month I mentioned that I tried to make mango muffins but they were horrible. Mango season only lasts so long so I thought I'd try again this month before all the mangoes were gone. And this time it worked perfectly! No more dense muffins. I started with the recipe that I used for plantain muffins and that is actually modified from Alton Brown's banana bread. Can't go wrong with Alton Brown. Once again I used Julie mangoes. Julie mangoes are a beautiful bright orange and are less fibrous than other varieties. Hayden or Bombay would have been great too.

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

The winning ingredients for this month's Crazy Ingredient Challenge were peanuts and zucchini. Simple enough. I thought of making some sort of salad since I told a friend that I'd try to have a raw meal one day soon. But eating cake always sounds better than eating a salad so I baked a cake instead.

There are people out there who will add zucchini to your desserts and then say, "You would never be able to tell that there's zucchini in here!" Those people are not telling the truth. Now I'll admit that I was not trying to hide the zucchini so I didn't grate it particularly fine. So you will definitely see lots of green in my cake. Even then, when you bite in, you can immediately tell that there's a little something green in there. It's not an overwhelming vegetable taste and you would not immediately go, "Is this zucchini? I taste zucchini!" But you would definitely say, "There's something in here. It tastes...hmm.... What is it?" It's far from unpleasant and since this is, at its base, a spice cake, there are lots of other flavours to tease out. Maybe if tiny shreds of zucchini are hidden in chocolate cake, those people might be telling the truth.

I don't know if I've ever mentioned Picky Nephew in a CIC post. Summary: Picky Nephew only willingly eats eggs and bread. Everything else is a fight. And don't you dare try to get him to eat while he's watching TV or playing a game. He walked into the kitchen when I was baking, asked a few questions, and complained that I was baking with the peanuts instead of giving him them to eat. I guess he likes peanuts? One can never tell. When the cakes were finished, I offered cake to everyone except him. I hadn't frosted them yet and he will tell you that he likes cake but he will only eat the frosting. I wasn't going to waste my time. He actually looked up from his game and insisted on tasting it too. He knew about the zucchini and didn't mind.

Zucchini isn't easy to find here in Jamaica. It was quite the treasure hunt to find the one man in the market who grows zucchini. I can't wait to get my hands on some more so that I can jump on the zucchini bandwagon that rolls around every summer.